On June 20th, a Santa Barbara, California jury found David Attias, 20, who killed four pedestrians and seriously injured another with his speeding car, insane when he committed these second degree murders. Not surprisingly, Tony Bourdakis, father of one of the victims, reacted bitterly when the decision was announced. “You can’t know how incredibly disappointed we are in this verdict. Once again, the state of California has shown the nation how you can twist the facts and get away with murder.” True enough, Attias will avoid the state pen, and will instead be confined to a state mental hospital for 10-15 years, before he would have a chance of release.
Since a charge of second degree murder, rather than manslaughter, means that Attias acted with malice, the insanity finding was not expected. After all, the key component for an insanity plea is not knowing right from wrong. Malice is “the intentional doing of a wrongful act without just cause or excuse, with an intent to inflict an injury or under circumstances that the law will imply an evil intent.”
While it strains credibility to explain how one can intentionally do wrong, without knowing right from wrong, it absolutely destroys the English language to hold that one can perform this act without just cause or excuse, and then obtain an excuse from the very jury panel that said there WAS no excuse.
On the same day, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that “mentally retarded” perps could not be executed. Dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia mocked the majority ruling, and predicted that it would cause chaos. “The symptoms [of retardation] can be feigned…This will turn the process of a capital trial into a game,” he noted.
So, being judged insane means you don’t serve hard time in a jail, and being retarded means you can commit horrific crimes and not get executed. It certainly seems as if the Law is very interested in getting into the heads of the perpetrators of criminal acts, for the express purpose of going easy on them, or so you might think.
Which brings us to the heady notion of “Hate Crimes.”
What if one or more of the group killed by Attias were gay or some other “oppressed” minority? Care to take any bets on an insanity plea then?
And what about the two guys who got the death penalty in the truck-dragging torture execution of black Texan James Byrd? I’m quite sure that neither of them would have broken 100, or maybe even 80, on an IQ test. Will the ACLU be rushing over to Huntsville, Texas to administer IQ tests to these worthy perps? Don’t hold your breath.
It’s very simple to make sense out of these apparent contradictions, even if the answer is as tragic as it is disgusting.
The liberal cryptocracy has no interest in getting into anyone’s head for any reason, regardless of what they may tell you. The retardation exemption is merely one more step in their incrementalism strategy for eliminating the death penalty, while unjustified insanity findings are another step in eliminating what little respect is left for our system of jurisprudence. “Hate crimes” is a designation intended to award protected status to homosexuals, but is cloaked in the acceptability of providing this status to blacks and certain other groups, as well.
Incrementalism has served these career Leftist America-haters well for a good long time, even if some of their bad medicine such as antitrust, the income tax, and the United Nations sprung up all of a sudden. Considering only the modern, enlightened era of the 1960’s, civil rights legislation led to affirmative action, which led to quotas. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), that made it legal to sell contraceptives in Connecticut under a penumbra of privacy, led the way to Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion.
Anti-discrimination laws protecting homosexuals have led to virtual gay lifestyle advocacy in everything from series television and public education, to parades, that formerly had nothing whatsoever to do with gender or sexual preference.
I don’t deny that there are kind souls out there who really believe in some of these causes, free from any other agenda. Unfortunately, they are still, to use Lenin’s term, “useful idiots.”
It remains to the rest of us, a group strong in numbers, to counteract this poison, even if with traditional media and most of the government co-opted, it already appears to be a lost cause.